DEVELOPMENT AS BREAKING AWAY AND OPENING UP:
A CHALLENGE TO VYGOTSKY AND PIAGET

Yrjö Engeström
University of California, San Diego, and the Academy of Finland

Understanding is something one does
best when one is on the borderline.

-Peter Høeg (1994), Borderliners, p. 37

INTRODUCTION

Recent work based on dialectics and the cultural-historical theory
of activity points toward three majorchallenges to the
developmental theories of both Vygotsky and Piaget: (1) instead of
just benign achievement of mastery, development may be viewed as
partially destructive rejection of the old; (2) instead of just
individual transformation, development may be viewed as collective
transformation; (3) instead of just vertical movement across levels,
development may be viewed as horizontal movement across borders.

In this paper, I will examine each of the three challenges, using
Peter Høeg's autobiographical novel Borderliners
(Høeg, 1994) as an appropriate case to concretize and
illuminate the challenges. I will suggest three theoretical concepts
- contradiction, zone, and mediation - as potential tools for
mastering the three challenges. I will discuss the place and meaning
of these concepts as resources embedded in Vygotsky' and Piaget's
theories.

I will conclude by questioning the explanatory potential of
developmental theory in the face of transformations such as the ones
described by Høeg. The question is, indeed: Does
development explain anything significant happening outside the
developmental psychologist's carefully chosen and constrained
"natural" settings?

A NARRATIVE OF PETER HØEG'S NARRATIVE

Peter is a 14-year old boy who has no parents and has grown up
through severe troubles in institutions. He is transferred to Biehl's
Academy, an elite private school in Copenhagen. The question is: Why?
He is drawn to two other outsiders in the school, Katarina and
August. Katarina has recently lost her parents through illness and
suicide. August has murdered his parents after years of abuse. Why
was August taken into Biehl's Academy?

But that they took August was inexplicable. When they
had the waiting lists and had no need to keep anyone. Why did they
take someone like him? It was this question that made me sure there
had to be a plan. (p. 31)

In the closed, controlled and tightly scheduled school
environment, the three start a laboratory experiment to find out what
is the plan behind their placement in the school and behind the
school's functioning. It is truly an experiment in that it involves
changing or disturbing the stable state in order to figure out its
logic. At an experiential level, the stable state appears as follows.

Well, one had no language of one's own when one came
to Crusty House [a previous institution in Peter's career;
Y.E.]. At Himmelbjerg House [another such institution] and the
other homes before that, one had got by with very few words.During
the first six months, one didn't say a word in class. At the end of
that time one had learned the basics. At Biehl's they were well and
truly driven home.One adopted their language, that of the teachers
and the schools, one had none of one's own. At first it was like a
release, like a key, like a road. The only road in.Much later one
discovers that what one was let into, back then, was a tunnel. From
which one can never again escape. Not entirely. Not in this life. (p.
15)

It was very difficult to be alone.The only time when it was hard
for them to avoid disintegration was when you were going from one
place to another. Like just after the bell had gone. (p. 24)

It was not just the classes and assembly that began on the dot.
There was also a study period and the meals and the chores and
voluntary sports and lights-out and when you had to get up if you
were to manage a proper wash, and what time every third week the
green vitamin pills for the next three weeks were dished out, and
what time on Sunday evenings you had to report back to Flakkedam
after weekends at home. I had all been allotted a stroke on the clock
that was most scrupulously observed. The inaccuracy amounted to less
than plus or minus two minutes.
No explanation of time was ever given. But one knew that it was
enormous, bigger than anything mortal or earthly. That one had to be
on time was not just out of consideration for one's schoolmates and
oneself and the school. It was also for the sake of time itself. For
God. (p. 39-40)

They came without warning - a handful of curt questions - and then
it was very important that one could answer. When he asked a question
it was as though, together with him, one closed in upon something
crucial.
The questions always concerned an event and a date. Those on the
inside could often remember them, those on the outside put their
hands up out of fear, without remembering anything, and sank deeper
into the darkness. (p. 51-52)

"If you can manage to stay on at the school - if you have
committed no violations or acts of gross negligence - then you're
here for ten years. During those ten years your time will be strictly
regulated, there will be very few occasions when you are in doubt as
to where you should be or what you should be doing, very few hours
altogether where you have to decide anything for yourself. The rest
of the time will be strictly regulated. The bell rings - you go up to
the classroom; it rings - you come down; it rings - you eat; rings -
work; rings - eat; rings - study period; rings - three free hours;
rings - bedtime. It's as if there are these very narrow tunnels that
have been laid out and you walk along them and nowhere else. They're
invisible, like glass that has just been polished. You don't see it
if you don't fly into it. But if you become blind or nearsighted,
then you have to try to understand the system." (p. 78)

Peter, Katarina and August begin their research with unnoticeable
individual experiments. Katarina is purposefully late five times so
she is sent to the headmaster: in the waiting room she makes a copy
of the teachers' timetable. August makes a drawing and doesn't get
praise from the art teacher; next time he makes the same drawing but
colors in the background - and gets a star and praise.

"It's something to do with time," she said. "You got a
star because you had spent more time on the second drawing. And spent
the time in a particular way. We think they have a plan, and that it
has to do with time."
"So the second one wasn't any better?"
Now he was looking straight into her face, she was careful not to
meet his gaze.
"There's no such thing as 'better,'" she said. "The second one just
fitted in better with their plan." (p. 87-88)

Communication between the three is prevented and they are isolated
from each other. When communication attempts continue, the school
administration decides to expel Peter and send him to a reform
school, while August is put under special control and heavy
medication. This triggers an escalation of the experiment.

Peter manages to make a copy of the school's master key, and the
three enter the school offices to search for documents and files that
would explain the plan behind accepting such pupils as Peter and
August. They lure the city's director of education into entering the
school. Posing as assistants to the school psychologist, Katarina and
Peter make the director face the heavily sedated August. Shaken by
the encounter, the director talks about the plan behind the school's
policy. As the final part of the experiment, Peter turns the school's
central clock ten minutes back, causing a momentary chaos.

The three escape into a shed on the school grounds. They review
the documents they've obtained and summarize their findings.

"Integrated," said Katarina. "They want to take
children from the reform schools and reformatories and put them back
into ordinary schools. Integration. That's the plan."
(...)
"He writes that the experiment is ahead of its time," she said. "That
it belongs to the future. That it is ahead of public opinion.
Therefore it would be better to carry it out discreetly. And not
unveil it until you could produce some convincing results."
(...)
"But it all went wrong for them," she said. "They must have thought
they could help, turn the school into a the 'Workshop of the Sun,'
like he said. Into a laboratory where the differences between those
who were damaged and those who were normal would be eliminated.
That's why you two were accepted." (p. 196-197)

When Peter and Katarina are asleep, August leaves the shed, enters
the school building and captures headmaster Biehl by force, breaking
several of his fingers. Peter and Katarina follow August, but he does
not respond and takes Biehl to the shed. August lights the gasoline
containers in the shed and burns himself to death, but lets Biehl out
just before his fatal action.

After these incidents, Peter and Katarina are isolated in
institutions and see each other only once more, at a hearing several
months later. Peter's institutionalization in a reform school almost
destroys him. The only way out is adoption, but to be adopted he
needs a good recommendation from Biehl's Academy. One night he
escapes, hitchhikes to Copenhagen, breaks into Biehl's Academy and
confronts Biehl. Peter shows a document, written by Biehl, which he
stole from the headmaster's office. It is a detailed record of all
the occasions when Biehl personally administered beatings and milder
physical punishments to the pupils. Peter asks for a good
recommendation for the adoption officials.

THE FIRST CHALLENGE: BENIGN ACHIEVEMENT OF MASTERY VS. PARTIALLY
DESTRUCTIVE REJECTION OF THE OLD

Both Piaget and Vygotsky, as most other theories of development,
depict development essentially as progression from a limited toward a
broader and more inclusive mastery over the environment and the self.
As such, development is a positive process. It may entail problems
and contradictions, but overall it is a benign process of
achievement. While this affirmative aspect is surely important,
exclusive focus on it makes developmental theory unable to deal with
destruction of the old as an equally important aspect of development.

The process recounted by Høeg was not at all benign. One
young person was destroyed, another institutionalized with little
hope, and a third one barely escaped institutionalization. A
large-scale societal experiment of integrating problem children into
normal school was severely damaged, as were the reputation of a
prominent school and the self-confidence of its staff.

Could such a process deserve to be characterized as 'development'?

If development is significant and relatively long-term qualitative
change in the way we relate to the world, the process described by
Høeg cannot be dismissed. The very idea of conducting an
experiment to make sense of the surrounding institution is a striking
case of awakening to self-awareness.

"So why this thing about a laboratory?" asked
August.
(...) "You have to have a place where you can gather your thoughts.
Like people who pray. That is what is difficult here at the school.
Peter says it is like glass tunnels. There is no chance to think for
yourself. A laboratory is a place that is shut off, so you have peace
and can think and carry out your experiment."
She had risen and started walking back and forth.
"It is already under way. It is in the middle of a period, we are not
where the plan says we should be, we have stepped out of the glass
tunnel. The experiment is already under way. Something is happening
to us, can you feel it? What is it? What's happening is that you are
starting to become restless, you want to get back, you can feel time
passing. That feeling is your chance. You can feel your way and learn
something you would otherwise never have seen. Like when I came late
on purpose. I stepped out of the tunnel I was used to walking along,
I saw Biehl, and I noticed something."
August was sitting bolt upright. He did not say a word, but his body
was listening.
"He's scared, too," she said.
"Why me?" said August.
(...)
"We have to find out why they took you. There is no understanding
it." (p. 92-93)

Here development would mean literally changing one's course of
life. Obviously such a self-conscious change is rare. But what about
less articulated cases of rebellion and deviation? Are they
non-development, or development gone astray, or natural periods of
teenage turmoil?

The challenge to developmental theory is to account for the
negative, destructive and explosive elements in developmental
processes without patronizing and reducing them to safe formulas at
the outset.

Developmental theories are about individuals. Even Vygotsky, a
champion of the social and cultural in developmental psychology, did
not conceptualize development as transformation of human collectives.
For him, development required social interaction and collaboration,
but it was the individual child who actually developed in the
collaboration.

The process described by Peter Høeg cannot be meaningfully
understood by breaking it down into three individual processes of
development. Such an approach would be formal analysis by elements
rather than genetic analysis by integral units, to paraphrase
Vygotsky (1986).

"August," I said.
Never, ever, can you abandon a child without tumbling into perdition
yourself. It is a rule against which one personally can do
nothing.
She had known this, before I said it she had known. It had never been
just us two, never just Katarina and me. There had always been three
of us, even before he came and I saw him for the first time.
(...)
And we sat on, saying nothing. I tried to find a solution, to find
out how to get August out, so that we could be together, all three of
us. The locks were there, before my eyes - first those between him
and us - on the main door and the doors to the corridor and the
sickroom, and the lock of the closet where they kept his outdoor
clothes and shoes at night. (p. 155-156)

In what way did the small collective of Peter, Katarina and August
develop as a collective? A contrast between Peter's past and
present is instructive.

At Crusty House we had three kroner a month dished out
and three saved; even so, you paid what you owed, it was an absolute
rule (...). The few times it happened that someone tried to get out
of it, they were made to jump from the willow tree down into the
lake. It was thirty feet down, but only three feet of water. You did
not break anything, but you sank into mud up to your chest and then
you were sucked down slowly and only pulled out after your whole head
had been under for a while.
So you always gave something in return and paid what you owed.
Everybody did. It was an absolute rule. (p. 17)

But we ascended the stairs. I did it for August. I sensed that the
law of reciprocation could not be a law of nature after all. When
people were weak and helpless, like August, for example, then it
might be necessary to do something for them without getting anything
in return. To do anything, no matter what.
And yet you did get something in return. I had descended and then
ascended to help and protect him. Now it was as though he was helping
me. As though you could set yourself free by helping others.
I cannot put it any better. (p. 132)

August and Katarina were sitting looking at me, it was all okay.
They did not assess me. Nor did they want me to achieve anything
further." (p. 199)

Here development means changing one's course of life, including
the destructive rejection of the old - but changing it together with
significant others, in a process of constructing a collective. The
challenge to developmental theory is to account for such processes of
formation of new collectives.

THE THIRD CHALLENGE: VERTICAL MOVEMENT ACROSS LEVELS VS. HORIZONTAL
MOVEMENT ACROSS BORDERS

Traditional developmental theories are about progress, about
climbing upward on some developmental ladders. In some theories, the
ladders are very well known and fixed; in others they are more
locally constructed and culturally contingent. But developmental
movement happens along a vertical dimension, from immaturity and
incompetence toward maturity and competency. Peter, too, realizes
this.

"The school is an instrument dedicated to elevation.
It works like this. If you achieve in the way you're supposed to,
time raises you up. That's why the
classrooms arearranged as they are. From Primary One to Three
you're on the ground floor, then you move to the second floor, then
the third, then to Secondary on the fourth, until at last - at the
very top, in the assembly hall - you receive your certificate from
Biehl. And then you can fly into the world." (p. 79)

"I've been wondering why it is so hard for them, why there are so
many rules. And it occurred to me that it is because they have to
keep the outside world out. Because it's not everywhere out there
that it raises up." (p. 79)

In other words, the exclusive concentration on the vertical
dimension of development requires closed boundaries, elimination of
horizontal movement across social worlds.

Høeg's story indicates that horizontal movement across
boundaries is developmentally at least as important as the vertical
movement. Peter, Katarina and August are all borderliners. Peter and
August were transplanted from the world of deviant outsiders into the
world of normals - but they refuse to adapt without questioning.
Katarina was kept in the world of normals as if nothing had happened
when her parents died - but she refused, too. The refusal and
questioning lead them across the border and out.

So now one could sit there, looking around at
everybody else. One could think about how, if one had respected the
school rules and not abused the trust placed in one, one could have
been singing away like them right now. Then one could still have been
on the borderline instead of, as now, being lost. (p. 117)

Here development means changing one's course of life, including
the destructive rejection of the old, together with significant
others - and by means of crossing boundaries between worlds, not just
by means of ascending on ladders of competence and maturity. The
challenge to developmental theory is to account for such processes of
boundary crossing.

Contradictions have an important role in Piaget's work (see
Piaget, 1980). For Piaget, contradictions were essentially mismatches
between the cognitive competency of the individual child and demands
of coordinating in a complex environment. Contradictions could thus
be resolved by means of cognitive reorganization. In the environment,
nothing had to be changed because objects and systems in the world
were not contradictory in themselves.

In Høeg's novel, crucial objects and systems in the world
are internally contradictory. Time and clocks are a case in point.

In the life of every person, on any conceivable plane,
an uninterrupted chain of both cyclic and linear traits can be found;
identical reenactments and unique, one-time occurrences.
There you have a contradiction in terms. (P. 224)

Time at Biehl's Academy was absolutely linear.
It's almost impossible to explain. Because at the same time, every
day was the same. Every school day was like all the rest. Looking
back at them, memory cannot distinguish between them. (p. 225)

In the dialectical theory of the Russian philosopher Evald
Il'enkov (1977; see also Bakhurst, 19XX), contradiction is not merely
a cognitive mismatch. Systems in the world are internally
contradictory. To develop means to tackle and resolve those real
contradictions in the world, both intellectually and practically. If
processes such as the one described in Høeg's novel are to be
accounted for by developmental psychology, we need a concept of
contradiction that resembles the concept put forward by Il'enkov.

Peter, Katarina and August did not develop along a well charted
vertical path. They traveled in an ill charted zone, and their
development included horizontal movement across boundaries.

The zone of proximal development has a central place in Vygotsky's
(1978) work. It is depicted as the distance between the actual
developmental level and the level of potential development reachable
under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers.
'Level' and 'more capable' are vertical notions. Thus, while Vygotsky
acknowledged the ill charted and locally accomplished nature of
development, he stuck to the idea of vertical improvement.

Høeg's story includes examples that resemble Vygotsky's
formulation, typically situations where Peter helps August to survive
or Katarina helps Peter to understand. But it is not just the more
competent pulling up the less competent. It is always also a question
of entirely different worlds meeting.

I was sure that Katarina had been thinking the same.
That, in that moment, we were thinking the same thought, without
having to discuss it. I was convinced of that.
Then she stood up and went over to the window, and just by the way
she walked I could see that I had been wrong.
"If there were no clocks in the school," she said, "what would you
know about time?"
Her voice had changed, she was in another world, she was another
person. Inside her, at the same time, there was another person - but
a different person - who had now taken over.
(...)
The two people were connected, they were both there at the same time,
but this one, the one that had now taken over, I would never
understand." (p. 157)

It is this inability to ever understand another world that has
great developmental significance. Carol Kramsch (1993) has recently
proposed the concept of 'contact zone' to describe important learning
and development that takes place as people and ideas from different
cultures meet, collide and merge. Kris Gutierrez and her co-authors
(Gutierrez, Rymes & Larson, 1995) suggest the concept of 'third
space' to account for similar events in classroom discourse where the
seemingly self-sufficient worlds of the teacher and the students
occasionally meet and interact to form new meanings that go beyond
the evident limits of both.

Again, if developmental psychology is to account for processes
such as those described by Høeg, we need to expand our
theoretical vocabulary beyond the vertical idea embedded in
Vygotsky's zone of proximal development and incorporate the
horizontal dimension in such zones. 'Contact zone' and 'third space'
are promising beginnings in this direction.

Høeg's subjects did not accomplish their developmental
journey single-handedly. Through the novel, a number of mediating
artifacts - keys, private written notes, and official records, in
particular - play important roles. Here I will discuss only keys.

The school key was lying awkwardly, but I just waited.
There came a moment when he shifted position and it was brought into
full view.
I concentrated on the depth of the cuts - nothing else. Afterward I
closed my eyes. And sort of tested myself on the key. As though I had
been up at the blackboard.
At last I had it. (p. 122)

I had found a place for myself beside a vise at the very back [of
the woodwork classroom]. Then I had cut out Fredhøj's key in
sheet metal as best I could from memory. Over the next few days I had
tried it out and made some adjustments to it. (p. 124)

In all its brevity, this is a beautiful and rather complete
description of re-mediation of action by means of internalization and
externalization of an artifact. On the surface, it looks like
straight reproduction of a given cultural tool (key) in order to
amplify one's powers of action (opening doors). Yet there is much
more to this episode. As Cole and Griffin (1980) and Latour (1994)
point out, re-mediation leads to the composition of new tasks and
goals. The mediating artifact not only amplifies, it opens up new
possibilities that lead to surprises. This happens when Peter and
August use the key to enter into the headmaster's office.

I put the file back. I switched on the light, just for
a second (...). Then I saw that one of the desk drawers was fitted
with a mortise lock.
This was absolutely normal. Biehl was the head of the school, there
had to be a locked drawer in his desk for stamps and maybe small sums
of money. There was no good reason for taking a look, and besides, we
were in a hurry.
But I did it anyway. I took a paper clip from the desk and used the
sheet-metal key as a wrench. I do not know why I did it, I suppose it
was out of habit.
And yet maybe it had not been habit. Maybe it was an attempt to see
inside Biehl. (p. 138)

The use of the key is no more understandable as a mere technical
extension of available means to perform a predetermined task. Opening
up doors leads to new doors, and it is no accident that at the
crucial point the key only serves as wrench. The object is no more
doors, it is headmaster Biehl's mind. To use Leont'ev's (1978)
terminology, such re-mediational shifts are important for the
understanding of the relationship between actions and activity,
between goals and motive.

Mediation and re-mediation by artifacts are central concepts is
Vygotsky's (1978) work. The process described by Høeg calls
for a conceptualization of mediation as more than technical
amplification. It calls for studies of artifact mediation in the
construction of new tasks, in the formation of motives, and in
related developmental shifts.

DOES DEVELOPMENT EXPLAIN ANYTHING SIGNIFICANT HAPPENING OUT THERE IN
THE WORLD?

So is the solution a combination of the positive and the
destructive, individual and collective, vertical and horizontal
aspects of development? Such additive theorizing won't take us far.

More likely the outcome is: not either one, not both combined, but
both alone, connected and transcended. Development emerges as
everyday creation or construction of the new in zones of uncertainty
riddled with contradictions and surprises and heavily dependent on
re-mediation by cultural artifacts. Developmental theory that takes
these challenges seriously will be able to explain significant
transformations in human life courses, at least partially.

REFERENCES

Bakhurst, D. (1991). Consciousness and revolution in Soviet
philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. New York:
Ballantine Books.